Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The aviation industry has experience with aircraft automation leading pilots into trouble, and so does the NTSB. Here's a former head of the NTSB commenting on the Asiana crash at SFO in 2014:[2] “How do we design this whole human-machine system to work better so we don’t lose the professionalism in the humans who are doing this?” Crash investigators are very aware of the problems of a poor man-machine interface leading pilots into a bad situation. That is the kind of thinking needed to make these kinds of systems work.
It's not about blame. Most air crashes have multiple causes. That's because the single points of failure were fixed long ago. This is somewhat different than the traffic law enforcement approach. The NTSB's previous investigation of a Tesla collision resulted in Tesla changing their system to enforce the hands-on-wheel requirement. That may not be enough.
Playing hardball with the NTSB is not going to work. The NTSB rarely uses it, but they have broad authority in investigations. They can get subpoenas. They can inspect Tesla's facilities, hardware, and software: "An officer or employee of the National Transportation Safety Board ... can ... during reasonable hours, may inspect any record, process, control, or facility related to an accident investigation under this chapter." The NTSB even has the authority to publicly disclose corporate trade secrets if necessary.[3] Aviation companies routinely cooperate, knowing this, and the NTSB seldom has to compel disclosure.
Incidentally, lying to the NTSB is a federal crime. The CEO of Platinum Jet Services tried to cover up some safety violations that resulted in a crash. He became Federal Prisoner #77960-004 from 2007 to 2013.[4]
[1] https://www.flyingmag.com/tags/aftermath [2] https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2014/october/21... [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/1114#b [4] http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/11/16/new.jersey.charter.convi...
The question is whether repeated incidences could cause the NTSB to suggest removal of the autopilot feature entirely (in its current state).
.@brand on a public twitter with enough followers to care about usually gets a pretty quick response.
Hell, how many times have YC companies prioritized support issues because a user posted it here on HN? I see it all the time with coinbase and crew, even googlers hanging out seem to be able to get account bans reviewed relatively easily.
I would argue the /r/teslamotors sub would be BETTER than going to Tesla directly. The motorist that died in this crash had contacted Tesla multiple times regarding this issue, since the crash plenty of others have made videos of similar behavior at similar median splits across the interstate system.
If the driver had made those complaints public perhaps others would have corroborated his accounts and or recreated the issue with video proof. Certainly putting somewhat public pressure on Tesla to fix the problem quickly.
If it does not detect hands on the wheel it disengages.
The argument they make is that having hands on wheel is, effectively, having the driver in the loop as a part of the safety system ready and able to take over 'instantaneously' if necessary.
I got into the habit of periodically giving it a good squeeze while resting my hand on it.
The FTC should require them to stop using the term Autopilot. The common understanding of that term makes it misleading.
Words matter and Tesla is trying to have the benefit of the term without the responsibility for what it implies.
I don't think the issue here is Tesla misusing the word. The issue is that the common (non-pilot) understanding of the term is wrong. People piloting heavy machinery have an onus to maintain their currency & proficiency, as well as be ready to correct for faults in their instrumentation and pilot aids.
Autopilot is intended to be a tool to reduce pilot workload so you can focus on other aspects of maintaining correct control of the vehicle. (Namely in an aircraft it assists you with aviation, leaving you better able to navigate & communicate.) Instead what we are seeing with these assists in cars is that people are using these pilot aids and then engaging in unrelated distractions.
Airplane autopilot: Engage, divert attention for minutes, not die (consistently). Tesla autopilot: Engage, divert attention for 10 seconds, die (also consistently).
Airplane autopilot!=Tesla autopilot. Name is misused.
Also take a moment to appreciate what you say "It's ok to use this name on cars, because professional pilots know you can't completely rely on plane autopilots. People should know that and if they die it's their fault."
The video you provided shows a very unusual case. Most autopilots on small aircraft are not really running software so such "bugs" are virtually non-existent, and in large aircraft they only use tested-to-death systems and they practically never bug out.
New autopilots in commercial airliners can do many things (follow GPS tracks or radio navigation waypoints, control engine throttle, line up and bring the airplane 50-100ft over the runway etc) but they never do collision avoidance, landings or terrain mapping. Airliners also have alarms for low altitude (most have radar altimeters) but they prompt the pilot for action, they're not supposed to avoid anything on their own. Apparently Tesla doesn't even do that.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-airplane-landings-be-conducte...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-often-are-airliners-landed-using-a...
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/cox/2014/02/...
[4] https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/technical/65056-autoland-...
The car is warning you if you take your hands off the steering wheel. I don't see how anyone but a moron would value their misconceptions about the term "autopilot" over the clear signals that your hands are required to be on the steering wheel.
I wish people would stop bringing this idiotic point about the term "autopilot" and instead talk about how the different designs of autopilot can encourage or discourage attentiveness in operators.
>I don't think the issue here is Tesla misusing the word. The issue is that the common (non-pilot) understanding of the term is wrong
In fact, because it's well-known that there's a common misunderstanding of the term (as you've acknowledged) but the company chooses to use it anyway, then that's sufficient to represent intentional misuse. They are leveraging this misunderstanding in their branding, then hiding behind the "real" meaning when it's convenient.
Companies test and invest heavily in their branding, which includes a full reasoning of the connotations associated with the words they choose. There is literally no way that Tesla is unaware of people's common misunderstanding.
So, maybe it's clearer if you look at it another way: why choose a word that could create any confusion when there are countless other choices?
>the pilot in command in this video is actively scanning for traffic, he is physically positioned to take control of the aircraft, he is paying attention to instrumentation, and is actively participating on frequency. In other words despite having an autopilot: he is still piloting the aircraft.
If a driver took a similar monitoring posture there are n-situations in which he/she would not have time to react to avoid an accident. There is generally far-greater margin of error and time for correction when an aircraft's autopilot fails. This is why a system that requires such monitoring in an automobile is a fundamentally flawed design. There are too many situations in which there is simply not enough time.
Because drivers are expected to a.) allow the system control of the vehicle but b.) recognize its failures and take back control to correct within milliseconds? That's super-human and, at best, adds n units to the human's reaction time--with potentially devastating consequences.
And, remember, it's beyond "environment monitoring". Drivers must now correct for when the vehicle does not recognize a hazardous situation and also respond when the vehicle itself suddenly creates a hazardous situation (like veering towards a barrier). There is no amount of "environment scanning" that can predict such a malfunction.
Pilots may realize that autopilot is a term that can refer to extremely simplistic systems that require constant pilot attention. The public at large that Tesla is selling to, however, equates the term with big airliner autopilots that could land the plane if needed.
Which is a tiny tiny percentage of the general population.
As has been said it is what the general population understands "autopilot" to mean which is the important part. The fact that the niche and general understandings are different should not be a gap that a company inserts itself into to mislead the public as to their products capabilities.
Yes, most people don't know the nuances of what "Autopilot" means in the aviation industry, but trying to educate the general public is a losing proposition vs just telling Tesla to rename the system.
well, you are driving a car from a paypal mafia founder. why everyone forget that Musk started by ignoring banking regulations and mostly laundering money quasi legally, while later on holding funds from everyone for arbitrarily enforced rules, while completely ignoring user complaints. (bye HN karma :)
seriously, why is that everyone hates paypal ethics but loves musk and hold him as holy?
It is fairly easy to find out what PayPal used to be like when Musk ran it - just ask some older eBay sellers.
Not unique to PayPal. Deposit a check of an amount that's unusual for your "profile" at Chase and it'll sit on the money for three weeks.
When I said 'first new thing in aerospace since the 70s' I meant shipped. Things that never shipped don't exist.
The Shuttle I suppose could count but it was a mixed bag and in some ways a step backward from the Saturn V.
Seems like people have flipped from mindless Musk worship to being haters all the sudden.
Tesla may fail but they validated the market for high-end electric cars. Before Tesla the popular narrative was that EVs are impractical, slow, have poor range, and can't possibly ever compete with ICEs. People argued that modern transportation was absolutely and fundamentally inseparable from oil, even spinning this into popular peak oil doomsday narratives.
The biggest threat to Tesla today is that now that they've validated the market larger more experienced car companies are jumping on the EV bandwagon.
Perhaps Delta and Atlas rockets were amazing innovations. They did great jobs with the recent mars missions. I don't recall getting particularly excited for many mars launches. (the missions were cool though).
Those boosters landing together though made me fell like a little kid watching a shuttle launch. But those boosters man. Maybe that's not innovation but that landing sure felt like a big moment to me.
I think the parent poster is trying to say, for a long time it felt like small refinements.
The funniest part of Tesla's statement is the fact that it basically renders "Autopilot" worthless. Or, at best, turns it into nothing more than an Adaptive Cruise Control system with an extremely misleading (and dangerous) name.
Tesla has been all too happy to let people believe that Autopilot is what the name implies. They only make a real effort to correct that misconception when something bad happens. Then they finally say "It's not actually autopilot, you're still supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road at all times", to which we collectively shrug and say "Well then what the hell is the point of Autopilot? And why did you give it such a misleading name?"
You know what I really want? I want a vehicle to save me when I screw up. I love skiing, but it's a dangerous sport, and the most dangerous part is driving home. You're in the mountains in the dark, the road might be icy, and you're tired from a long day of strenuous exercise.
I want to see humans and machines working together. A car that could spot deer on or beside the road would save lives. They can be very difficult to see in the dark, and hitting one could send it through your windshield at highway speed.
Augmenting human ability has a lot of potential. Even just adding sensors that humans don't have would be huge. I bet those deer are way more obvious in infrared.
If you fall asleep while driving, it may prevent you from driving into a barrier or on-coming traffic. It's not meant to take over the act of driving from you, but to provide assistance.
Ugh.
...and be ready to correct it should it try to steer into objects. IMHO that's even worse than plain old "manual" driving --- at least in that case, the car doesn't have a mind of its own and won't suddenly decide to steer itself. It'll keep going in a straight line even if (absolutely not recommended on a public road, but a good way of checking the suspension and steering) you take your hands off the wheel.
To me, it sounds more like driving with Tesla autopilot is like being a driving instructor for a not-too-great learner.
This is literally what Teslas autopilot system is.
It is adaptive cruise control and lane assist.
They do not claim to be self driving. It is not a level 3 system. It is level 2.
The purpose of autopilot is to have both the features of lane assist and adaptive cruise control.
What's the big deal? Why is this so surprising to you? This is what it is. Go buy a car from Google if you want a self driving level 3 car.
If you don't want a level 2 system then don't buy it.
I trust the intelligence of drivers, but this brings up a good point. Could calling it "autopilot" be perhaps a bit much right now? I'm not claiming it's false advertising kind of bad, but I can see it being better for marketing than giving a reasonable sense of what the feature is capable of.
When autopilot on airplane crashes the plane, what do you think is the primary cause?
Autopilot is a well known word which suggests a certain level of autonomousness and a car that might kill you if you take your attention away for 6 seconds simply does not qualify for that name. Tesla changing the name from autopilot to something better resembling reality would send a strong message to people to be more careful with using it while the attention is somewhere else
Airplane autopilots really are solving a much simpler problem than even a level 3 autonomous car has to solve.
The most advanced autopilots can automatically takeoff and land, but that requires substantial ground equipment at each airport to support.
You say that it would take a massive investment but realistically existing signage, reflectors, and road markings probably cost more than the equivalent for an autonomous vehicle would.
The exciting thing about self-driving cars this time was that they worked on existing roads, making them financially feasible.
Perhaps final stages of ILS approach? That'd be the exception, but pilots are trained and certified for this - and definitely not allowed to snooze off then.
(I'm not a pilot, but have spent a fair amount of time and money on various PC flight sims; edit: and used to drive a Mazda 3 with a very good radar cruise control and AEB, before ditching it for a bicycle because getting old and fat).
The driver is licensed to operate the motor vehicle. It is their responsibility to be familiar with the safe operation of the vehicle.
> how to handle autopilot and its common errors and how to correct them?
Do you believe that anything additional was required here other than keeping the car in it's lane?
Also, note that the beep is the driver taking over from autopilot.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil...
But blaming this on the use of the term "Autopilot" is idiotic and discussion centering around it is silly when there are much more important questions to answer about the design of autopilot, other driver assistance systems, and the future of self-driving cars.
99% invisible has a really interesting story about this topic: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...
GA autopilots may be more limited, but that’s not what the general public is thinking of when you say autopilot.
This is far from a defense of Tesla. On the contrary, the public's ignorance about what capabilities are implied by 'autopilot' suggest to me that Tesla should not be using the word.
I once had the privilege to sit in the cockpit during an entire flight. That was in the late nineties and probably would be completely out of the question nowadays.
The weather and visibility were shitty and what was really interesting was that they initiated the landing automatically, but when the runway become visible (about 400 meters) the first officer took over and landed the plane manually.
Two other things I learned is the amount of manuals they have available in that very cramped space (maybe maintained electronically nowadays) and that when you think that they just key in a couple sequences into the flight management system to then play solitaire you would be very wrong.
Both pilots where permanently active and on high alert during the entire one hour flight. That may be a bit more relaxed on long distance flights, but people who believe it's like driving a bus are really, really wrong.
it was an amazing and very interesting experience.
Tesla is claiming that if the drivers hands are not on the wheel then they are not responsible what what their "autopilot" does.
Autopilots in commercial aircraft - the kind that you'd be flying from San Francisco to New York are capable of far more then just dumb cruise control, including navigation and landing.
If 'maintain pitch and direction' were enough to be 'autopilot', then my SO's '97 Toyota Avalon had 'autopilot'.
If I name something warp drive, are you then entitled to believe that you will now be able to travel faster than light? Will you blame me for naming the product incorrectly if you travel at a speed less than c?
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Autonomous_car#/Levels_of_drivin...
pilots are level 3 upwards according to this classification. Level 2 systems are called assistants. If tesla would adhere to the industry agreement, they would call their system an "assistant" and not a pilot.
What I haven't seen discussed: Are these cars from other manufacturers having similar problems with crashing into things? Are Tesla crashes considered more newsworthy, which is why we hear more about them? Or are drivers of these other cars more attentive? Or do these other cars actually have better technology?
Just curious why the discussion is always Tesla "autopilot" vs Waymo "full autonomy" vs unaided humans, when other manufacturers are also putting level-2 "lane keeping" systems on the road.
Because, ironically, Tesla and Waymo (and Uber) have been more suscessful at deliberately drawing media attention. The thing is, once you draw media attention, it tends to stick around even when the story goes someplace you don't want it to.
Other car manufacturers are more careful than Tesla in what they let get out of the lab. For example, they wouldn’t have to send out a firmware update that, as a new requirement, forces users to keep their hands on the steering wheel (https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2016/09/23/te...) because they wouldn’t yet dare deploy one that doesn’t.
And I don’t think their technology is worse than Tesla’s. See for example https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520431/driverless-cars-ar... (2013).
Your comment suggests that Tesla's claims about the driver having his hands off the wheel for x seconds before a crash could be wrong. If the sensors detect the drivers hands are not on the wheel when they actually are on the wheel, then data logged about how long the driver's hands were off the wheel should be considered suspect.
I hope that's being investigated.
Personally, I'm having trouble believing the driver who died in the recent accident ignored the warnings for six seconds before the head-on collision, especially when he knew Autopilot didn't work well at that section of road.
I'm not familiar with how the system works. If the warning engages, is there a guarantee that the driver will have to take over shortly? Or are there scenarios when the warning turns off by itself and so the driver could have been waiting to see if the car would correct?
[Edit: lolc and Vik1ng pointed out that the warning isn't related to unsafe conditions as I implied. It's used whenever the sensors think the driver's hands are off the wheel.]
There were never warnings at that time. Tesla just worded it like that to mislead people. It only talks about videos early in the drive.
This seems pretty clear:
"The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision."
Tesla seems to think they know exactly what happened after only reviewing data collected from the car. They see what they want to see and have become blind to any other possibility. I think that's terrifying. I couldn't trust an automaker with that kind of arrogance.
Dumb question: if I have to constantly stay vigilant with 1-second reaction time because at any time my assisted-driving car might try to kill me (exactly how changes every time the software updates) -- isn't it less effort to just drive my car myself, so I mostly just have to worry about the drivers around me?
;-)
Who cares if he had 5 seconds to see the barrier if he only had 0.5 seconds to realize that the car went into casual murder mode right as it veers into the barrier. They make it sound like it had to have been driver error with facts that are irrelevant to the question at hand. Your assumption that Tesla claimed he didn't have his hands on the wheel at the time of the accident is exactly what I'm talking about, Tesla's PR release is filled with weasel words to do exactly that.
I'm not even trying to suggest that Autopilot is less safe than an alert human driver, but one thing is clear, we certainly can't trust Tesla to determine how safe it is.
You are wrong: "the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision."
see: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...
Perhaps you shouldn't attack Tesla for using "weasel words" in their press release if you don't take the time to read it.
Edit: You seem to have edited your post without any disclaimer. Your edits were not visible when I responded. Most people on HN will edit their comments with an "Edit: I was wrong about ____" rather than ninja editing the mistaken claim away. This help make discussions easier to follow and limits misunderstandings.
Originally when this was posted there was concern over if "prior to the collision" was talking about the 6 seconds before the collision or earlier in the drive. In any case, Tesla is implying that the victim wasn't driving responsibly and there's no data released to the public that would back up such a claim.
So, if the statement is actually carrying more information about the reliability of the hand-detection system when it sounds like it should be a claim about the driver's hands (the subject of the passive-voice sentence), it is misleading.
This video is quite relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I
A fully alert driver trying (and succeeding) in reproducing this behaviour. Observe how long the barrier is visible, how long it takes him to react, and how close the car was to hitting the barrier.
Musk has commented publicly before (though somewhat obliquely) about this flaw. He indicated that the company is trying to build a map of reference data so that it can be filtered out automatically, and real hazards can be seen/found.
This is part of why trying to second guess a driver or autopilot is insane; a crashing and non-crashing car are almost identical, except for the crash.
Its foolish to oversell thru marketing the capabilities of AP, as it's fairly easy to conflate reliability with observed behavior.
As long as the system mimics enough of the capabilities of full autonomy and it's oversold as such customers will underestimate the risks and become victims of an unfinished product
https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
If you use this to market your car without any caveats, don't be dismissal of some people who might read into that your car is capable of self-driving, when in reality its clearly absent of anything of the sort.
Owners see marketing occasionally. Owners see the reminder that they have to stay alert 100% of the time each time they turn on Autopilot. Owners get the alert that they need to put their hands back on the wheel. And so forth.
If you've got data about owners being confused, please share.
Meanwhile, next time an owner offers anecdata about what they personally have learned about Autopilot's capabilities, perhaps you could respond to that, instead of telling the owner that they're being dismissive.
This is not what I experience. Maybe the sensor in your steering wheel is faulty? For me, the warning goes away as soon as I lightly jiggle the steering wheel (I stop as soon as I encounter any resistance).
As noted in the article, the information being released includes blaming the victim and other PR spin. This doesn't serve the public or further highway safety; it further's Tesla's commercial goals.
If Tesla's withdrawal hampers the investigation, let's hope the agency uses its subpoena power to get the info it needs to determine the cause of the accident and what Tesla needs to do to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
The crash rates are for all miles travelled before and after Autopilot installation and are not limited to actual Autopilot use.
Both buckets also have plenty of miles with adaptive cruise control on - the data can't be used for a human vs autopilot comparison.
And even taking those considerations into account, there is a lawsuit [1] asking for the data used to come to those findings which NHTSA and Tesla have both resisted.
Tesla has never proven that Autopilot is safer than a human driver.
[1] https://jalopnik.com/does-teslas-autosteer-really-cut-crashe...
That's (a) comparing Teslas to Teslas, not to all vehicles, and (b) not necessarily comparing safety, but crash rates.
however, if you want to compare AutoSteer vs no Autosteer, you need to compare Teslas to teslas, and compare crash rates not fatalities.
One such example of this is at https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil...
> Yep, works for 6 months with zero issues. Then one Friday night you get an update. Everything works that weekend, and on your way to work on Monday. Then, 18 minutes into your commute home, it drives straight at a barrier at 60 MPH.
> It's important to remember that it's not like you got the update 5 minutes before this happened. Even worse, you may not know you got an update if you are in a multi-driver household and the other driver installed the update.
A lot of the other car-safety innovations usually have a failure state where it doesn't put you in a worse off position that you normally would have been in, should that innovation not have existed (e.g., crumple zones, crash-safe interiors, highway design/signage, ABS, etc.).
Reducing the absolute # of car deaths is always a good thing, and undoubtedly # of deaths saved by AutoPilot > # of deaths caused by AutoPilot, but looking at that comparison makes people worrisome, especially if you can picture yourself on the RHS of that equation.
Personally I'm not sure where I stand. I do find it uncomfortable having ever-increasing levels of software complexity in my car.
And Tesla said they'd continue to cooperate with the investigation, so why do you think a subpoena is suddenly needed?
We don't know and that's exactly the reason why NTSB has their disclosure policy in place.
It's to stop biased actors from dominating or setting the narrative early, before impartial actors have had a chance to corroborate what happened.
What if the car malfunctioned and the warnings weren't sounding? What if the warnings were sounding even though Huang had his hands on the wheel (as another poster above indicated has happened to them)?
I simply can't take what Tesla says at face value given the huge vested interest they have in controlling the story here.
> Over a year ago, our first iteration of Autopilot was found by the U.S. government to reduce crash rates by as much as 40%.
Why don't they talk only about Autosteer instead of Autosteer+AEB (and other features combined). Why not discuss how many accidents could have been caused by Autopilot if the driver did not correct it. Why is there no commentary on if whether their active driving system would be better run as a passive driver error correction system, as other manufacturers do.
> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident.
Ahh, so a Tesla is safer than a 10 year old beaten down car with no airbags driven on country roads, I never expected that. Tesla is safer than even a motorbike, what a surprise. And just having Autopilot in your car (even disabled), makes you 3.7 times less likely to die. Does that say anything about Autopilot, or are they just touting non-Autopilot premium safety features?
> There are about 1.25 million automotive deaths worldwide. If the current safety level of a Tesla vehicle were to be applied, it would mean about 900,000 lives saved per year.
So, motorbikes driving in Himalyas are more deadly than a Tesla on California highways, who would have guessed. What does this say about Autopilot again?
> We expect the safety level of autonomous cars to be 10 times safer than non-autonomous cars.
Elon musk also expected driverless cars to be everywhere in 2017. And autonomous doesn't need to mean hands off driverless cars, they keep conflating assistive feature benefits with their hands-off technology.
Of course none of this data is very meaningful. You have to compare the rates of autopilot users to non-autopilot users of similar demographics, and have all crashes recorded, not just fatalities, to get close to a comparative samples.
Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year (2013, WHO):
UK 2.9
Spain 3.7
Germany 4.3
France 5.1
USA 10.6
Seriously, would Tesla's autopilot lower the crash rate in the UK? In Thailand? I guess it wouldn't change much in European countries, and any good car would do the same in poor countries.
Why not?
Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r..., here is another table (same countries, same order) giving road fatalities per 10⁹km in 2015:
UK 3.6
Spain 7.8
Germany 4.9
France 5.8
USA 7.1It's hard to gather statistics about thing like that because it just look like a normal drive unless the driver records the near miss which is unusual unless they're driving with a dashcam or have had something happen in the same place multiple times.
http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/quality-control-...
So Tesla files an FOIA and claims they are the transparent ones. This is a bad attempt at PR.
I disagree. People need to know that autopilot doesn't eliminate their responsibility for safely driving the vehicle and paying attention. People need to know they HAVE to respect the autopilot warnings. If that is happening too much in an area and so is too cumbersome, then don't use autopilot. And to wait a year for that to be released would not be in the public interest. Neither would a year of unanswered BS from short interests and competitors, considering that Tesla's vehicles overall are incredibly safe.
I think NTSB's action to remove Tesla is fine. Tesla felt they had to release such information (and there's a good argument for that, IMHO), but that is against NTSB's policy as it could compromise the investigation. So be it. Removing them may be best for all.
That is only to weasel out of the legal issues. They are doing marketing stuff that pushes the feature as vastly more capable on the side..For ex Elon Musk tweeting videos that shows cars traveling by itself on unmarked roads..And having declarations such as "The human behind the wheel is only for legal reasons, the car is driving all be itself" and such..
So the actual marketing is based on this unrealistic projection, and only these "statements", which the public will soon forget, is based on its true capability..
Which supports my point. Theses responses likely have had a bigger influence from lawyers than PR folks. The goals of those two groups are almost diametrically opposed to each other. The best thing for Tesla from a legal perspective is to downplay the capabilities of autopilot. The best thing for Tesla from a marketing and PR perspective is to exaggerate the capabilities of autopilot. Tesla is doing the former in these responses. They are choosing the legal response over the PR response. It also should be noted this is also probably the best move from a public safety standpoint. I don't know why people are claiming these responses are PR spin or how these response could possibly sell more cars.
Regarding the rest of your post, I was not talking about Tesla's general marketing. I haven't seen Musk do anything like you claim. That is certainly misleading and irresponsible if he does do that and implies that any current Tesla can "drive all be itself"
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some fear over allowing uncertainty to fester for a year while awaiting the results of the investigation. But I think there's a much bigger risk in being perceived as unwilling to play by the same rules as everyone else.
The problem with this is that Tesla clearly believes that autopilot plus an attentive driver is safer than an attentive driver alone. I think that is most likely true.
It is possible that autopilot plus an inattentive driver is less safe than an attentive driver alone. I think this is plausible, but I don't think there is any real evidence to prove this one way or another.
The question then becomes does Tesla have an obligation to save the people in the second group from themselves and in turn put the people in the first group in greater danger?
That avoids prejudging whether it was primarily a defect with the vehicle, or driver error, or both.
Above all just respect the process. It's important to yield to an impartial entity when people have been hurt or killed.
Please take a look at the very start of the video attached here [1]. It says "The person in the driver seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself".
Now, the next one [2], where Elon Musk retweeted a video of a Tesla navigating an unmarked road. There is a reddit discussion about the same here [3]
[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2231417/tesla-shows-off-self-d...
[2] https://twitter.com/Teslarati/status/980476745106231297
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/88yk66/elon_ju...
Both videos also show attentive drivers who are able to jump in at a moments notice. The first video is a promo video and the second is from a Tesla fan. I wouldn't be surprised if they were specifically edited to showcase the car's features. I can certainly understand how someone might view these videos and think that autopilot is flawless, but I don't think Tesla is doing anything unethical in those videos.
Any faith the driver had in Tesla's autopilot system would be due to Tesla's marketing. If Tesla believes its self driving capabilities are not quite ready for market, maybe they shouldn't be selling it and calling it an "autopilot".
To tell people that you have to pay attention 100% of the time your don't need any of the details. You have stated that over and over again, it just doesn't do enough, because a few weeks later people have forgotten all these statements and new customers or people who just like the car, but don't follow the company might never even have read them.
The problem with this strategy is that literally no one is clamoring for a self-driving car that requires you to have a license, both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road, and to be alert at all times.
If you have to mention it, fine, but engineer the ways you mention it to have low penetration and low retention.
You could make the same silly linguistic argument about "cruise control."
Saying clearly that abdicating your responsibility to drive the car can (and has) resulted in deaths does serve public safety. Its critically important that people driving this section of road (and others like it) know about this as soon as possible.
Call it victim blaming if you want, and certainly there was some spin, but it is unfair to say that this has no safety element.
> Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB
> The National Transportation Safety Board told Tesla Inc. on Wednesday that the carmaker was being removed from the investigation of a fatal accident, prior to the company announcing it had withdrawn from it, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
> NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt relayed the decision in a call to Tesla’s Elon Musk that was described as tense by the person because the chief executive officer was unhappy with the safety board’s action. NTSB is expected to make a formal announcement in a release later Thursday, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Technically, that's sorta true. By releasing information and opinions about the ongoing investigation, Tesla decided not to be a part of it.
Any 'artificially intelligent' car that can't avoid running straight into something solid right in front of it is dangerously stupid. Elon's age is starting to show.
The issue at play here is far larger than a car having a crash. The issue I was referring to is the actions of Tesla as they respond to the crash. That is cultural and it affects both the process of creating and releasing products as well as the process of responding to their failure. If your product can kill people, and lets be clear - cars can easily kill people SDV or not - you need to act like professionals when something happens. Playing the blame game, in public, and violating the expectations of a body like the NTSB shouldn't garner trust, no matter who is right at a technical level.
EDIT: fixed my abysmal grammar.
So instead, Asimov's Rule#1: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
"You can't fire me, I quit!"
Also laughable from Tesla's statement. "We are committed to transparency as a company, and NTSB was telling us we couldn't release information about AutoPilot, and that was unacceptable to us".
Huh, all those people looking for service manuals may be curious to hear about Tesla's corporate commitment to transparency.
Call me a sceptic, but saying that with absolute certainty is troubling. As an engineer, knowing how a lot of software and hardware systems are actually implemented, 6 seconds is such a minuscule time frame. Data about hand position could be in a write cache somewhere waiting to be flushed, inside monitoring service, inside OS, inside RAID controller, inside storage controller, or even de-prioritized by a busy IO scheduler. Then at a moment of a crash that the data might never make it to the storage for recovery.
I'm not saying that it is, but if the hand monitoring service is glitching out, it will take a lot of time to resolve the issues completely, mostly because just looking at the data as a remote observer (without camera installed in a car) it would just look like the hands were not on the wheel.
Also it doesn't help that for Tesla it seems to be a nice way out of this kind of crashes – they can just say that driver's hands were not on the wheel and that's that. Who even has the data and can decode it? How can we make sure the data was not tampered with?
This needs to be investigated properly and not just by Tesla, they are a biased party.
Of course, I don't actually know what the logs look like, but I'd rather err on the side of assuming that the designers of a real-time system for monitoring something related to driver safety took into account the idea that, when the car is involved a severe crash, they should have as much accurate data recorded as possible rather than leaving it sitting around for ages in un-flushed caches.
Plus, it's a pretty common complaint in Tesla forums.
On the other hand, this is effectively an admission by Tesla that there are serious problems with the autopilot system. It should never guide the car into a barrier, no matter where the driver's hands are.
The car should be conservative about the threshold it uses for the sensors in determining if there are hands (because it would rather err on the side of telling someone to put their hands back on, than err on the side of thinking someone has their hands on when they don't), but engineers analyzing the logs after a crash wouldn't have to use that same threshold when trying to determine if the driver was in control of the car at the time of the crash.
It's a geological amount of time to a real-time system, which anything related to controlling a car absolutely will be. "Multiple seconds of unpredictable latency are OK" is an attitude that doesn't get you far when interacting with the physical world, and that's why there is an entire discipline dedicated to dealing with it that has to use special chips (e.g. the ARM R series), special OSes (e.g. VxWorks), and special tools (special IDEs, oscilloscopes, special cameras) to rise to the occasion.
If they let a "latency doesn't matter" system near any of these data streams, that's the scandal.
Or hardware failure, possibly injecting faults into the system. See Page 14: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloLMRadarTND6849.pdf
s/will be/should be/ -- defects in design notwithstanding. Note that the latency involved with the sensing equipment (skin conductivity? pressure sensor?) could be large enough to be significant.
The logging service that writes it down isn't really critical to the operation of the car. Even the notification has a geological amount of time before it has to notify the driver when compared to many other systems that operate on a near self driving car. I wouldn't be surprised if less critical components shared a non realtime timeslot between the actual realtime tasks.
That may be why they were removed, there's an inherent conflict of interest when only Tesla engineers are able to decipher Tesla's crash data.
You are vastly overestimating things here.
Critical functionality in a car would rarely if ever involve non-deterministic delays. Furthermore, the OS itself (if there even is one) would be a real-time OS.
But even if we assume such delays are present in a Tesla steering wheel monitoring task, absolutely none of the delays you listed would approach anything near a second...
It might not be safety-design-critical to have a record of the hand-presence sensor with high resolution, merely high enough resolution for safe operation of the vehicle.
Flushing these records to storage is an independent function for the sake of service/support/maintenance and is likely not a regulatory requirement. Though regulatory agencies are bound to be interested in the data.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-acc...
with the "last update" (the one that triggered the NTSB reaction):
https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident
as it allows to easily identify the "boilerplate" parts, but, more than that, the "first update" closes with:
"Out of respect for the privacy of our customer and his family, we do not plan to share any additional details until we conclude the investigation.
We would like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of our customer."
So, logically, either the respect for the family vanished or Tesla concluded their investigation (in three days time).
I don't understand why the change. They've already co-operated with the NTSB in the first Autopilot death (back in 2016) [0] with a much simpler PR statement [1] that didn't upset the NTSB.
[0]: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF
- Original: https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-acc...
- Update: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...
- Newest: http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-tesla-issues-strong...
None of which address the multiple videos of people reproducing the accident at the same and different locations, and none take any responsibility for this likely bug (lane centering in non-lanes) introduced in an over the air update.
Even Reddit's Tesla Motors sub which used to be a 24/7 Tesla celebrating has been pretty negative about Tesla's handling of this incident, and I'm talking regular posters and verified Tesla owners.
Mr. Musk seems like he's becoming increasingly erratic and controlling, and there's a record of him being unable to take criticism. This is a pretty intense form of criticism.
Given all that, it seems fair to assume that Musk is under a lot of pressure at the moment; and stressed-out people make bad decisions.
citation needed
Now Tesla is kicked out of the investigation, so I assume any leverage they had to help with the investigation is now gone.
The investigation will continue on, and the NTSB will conduct it fairly, Tesla just won't be involved. I understand both sides, Tesla desperately wants to tell it's side publicly, and the NTSB wants all participants to stay quiet till investigation completes.
Telsa just gave up their opportunity to share their own perspective on the investigation. That could have consequences.
The other hands ask: what don't we know that's causing them to act like this.
Moi? I would presume the NTSB is being manipulated somehow in someway to slow Tesla down and/or knock them from there perch. Look at their valuation. Certainly their must be long time auto industry ego who find that offensive.
Something is drifting sideways but it feels like there are other less obvious forces and influences involved.
Why should they wait a year before making a public statement?
And releasing it doesn’t prejudice the investigation in any way.
2. As the NTSB noted, part of the reason for these rules is also PR-related - they want to make sure that other parties' decision-making processes on information-sharing aren't warped by the need to get favorable information out in public faster.
3. Most importantly - showing no respect for the procedures of the agency investigating you indicates a mentality that puts you above third-party judgment.
...says nothing about the hands. It only says something about the sensors, until there is conclusive evidence from a secondary source.
> TESLA: "The only way for this accident to have occurred is if Mr. Huang was not paying attention to the road, ..."
Nobody knows what happened. Huang may have had his hands on the wheel, which the system failed to register, and the car made a turn that he wasn't able to correct in time without hitting other vehicles.
And, if there is evidence Tesla has been negligent, the only way they can win is by not being forced to release this evidence, perhaps by attacking the NTSB as being biased against Tesla.
The radar can't distinguish between overhead signs, trees and things on the side of road. It only track moving things, otherwise there would be too many false positives and the car will keep braking every few minutes. Other Level 2 autonomous systems have the same limitation.
You might recall, Tesla hit a stationary fire truck in Jan [0]. This was caused due to a similar limitation in their software. Tesla was following a car at a slow speed. When that car suddenly moved out of the way to avoid hitting the Fire truck, Tesla AutoPilot accelerated to match the set speed and hit the fire truck. To summarize, if a moving car suddenly moves out of the way, Tesla will almost always hit whatever is stopped further down the lane. They even call this out in their User Manual.
Tesla is hoping that it would be able to get it's Vision capabilities to the point where it would be able figure out obstructions using cameras working in conjunction with the radar. But there is no committed timeline for this.
LIDAR is able to avoid this by using directed LASERs to build a 3d outline of all the surrounding objects. A system relying on LIDAR would have challenges in RAIN and falling snow. However under natural conditions (where most Tesla deaths with Autopilot have occurred - hitting a SEMI from side, hitting the barrier recently), LIDAR would be able to completely avoid the accidents.
However, if and when, Tesla vision capabilities are able to detect obstructions, they might be much cheaper and more effective than LIDAR in all kind of weather condition. Hoping they can get there soon. And I also wish they would fix their marketing to more accurately reflect the capabilities of the driver assist system and stop misleading the public.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/22/tesla-on-autopilot-sl...
I feel like some of the criticism of tech companies has gone from thoughtful to kneejerk lately.
Tesla could survive this accident easily if they handle it properly. Keep mishandling it, and Tesla could be in a world of hurt.
What Tesla has done is the worst of both worlds -- it puts them at odds with regulators, and it helps sustain the story.
I was talking with someone just yesterday about Zuckerberg's Congressional hearings. They don't know a whole lot about technology or the internet, but are generally thoughtful and good at what they do. What do you think their view was?
'Good on him for taking responsibility and apologizing - he seemed sincere and reasonable. I feel much better about the whole thing.'
I'm getting better at biting my tongue, but I wanted to suggest that I had a bridge to sell them.
for example: http://bgr.com/2017/03/02/tesla-crash-video-texas/
The US has a problem with corporate denial PR? Then the US should go and fix the ridiculous laws that allow for 2.7M $ awarded damages for a cup of spilled hot coffee! As long as it is possible (and usual) that companies have to pay way outsized damages, that won't change. Consumer safety suffers as a consequence.
[1] She suffered third degree burns and required months of skin grafts.
Contrast this with Tylenol, which when confronted with the sales of tampered bottles, launched a PR campaign that is still widely regarded as the only proper way to address a safety crisis. In a nutshell: (1) don't blame the victims, (2) take full responsibility to fix things even if it's not your fault, and (3) carry out that plan to fix things.
That particular lawsuit was bad and so was it's result. Sometimes courts get it wrong, like for example in this case.
Coffee temperature was right. Lowered one is wrong.
What will happen?
The guy hadn't touched the wheel for six seconds, in traffic. WTF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_965
Basically, distracted/lost pilots accidentally used an autopilot/flight management system to program a flight path that took a jet into the side of the mountain. They did receive a warning in the cockpit, but attempted to recover too late.
Now, to your question (from the Wikipeida article linked above): "American Airlines settled numerous lawsuits brought against it by the families of the victims of the accident. American Airlines filed a "third-party complaint" lawsuit for contribution against Jeppesen and Honeywell, which made the navigation computer database and failed to include the coordinates of Rozo under the identifier "R"; the case went to trial in United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami. At the trial, American Airlines admitted that it bore some legal responsibility for the accident. Honeywell and Jeppesen each contended that they had no legal responsibility for the accident. In June 2000, the jury found that Jeppesen was 30 percent at fault for the crash, Honeywell was 10 percent at fault, and American Airlines was 60 percent at fault."
So, yes - even in a situation where the automation system in question was much more rigorously tested and the users had much more specialized training, the automation system was found to be partially at fault.
Tesla autopilot is driver assist, not automated driving.
If you want to put someone on trial, you first have to establish a crime.
If the crime is a bug in autopilot, then yes, Tesla is guilty.
If the crime is killing the driver of a vehicle because of an accident, then Tesla is not guilty.
We can talk about bugs in software outside of a manslaughter case.
Not all trials are criminal trials. Some are civil trials, meaning generally that a tort occurred and one person is suing another to recover damages. That is the most likely trial in this situation.
If the crime is a bug in Autopilot, then an engineer at Tesla might be guilty of any number of crimes. How the driver dies doesn't particularly matter if the bug causes his death. But more likely, Tesla is liable for product defect resulting in the death of one customer and the near-death experiences of at least 3 other drivers.
This isn't a manslaughter case. But it is a product liability case+negligence+libel+invasion of privacy+intentional infliction of emotional distress case when it didn't have to be, and those additional claims will likely destroy Tesla financially. Trial experts have been quoted as saying a verdict in excess of $100 million is likely if Tesla were stupid enough to go to trial (and right now, Musk is definitely being that stupid).
This phrasing is Tesla spin, and I recommend being a bit more cautious about accepting what they say about this at face value.
A Tesla motors car cannot detect whether or not your hands are on the wheel -- it can only detect torque on the steering column from the driver if it exceeds a specific threshold. Regular Tesla drivers have documented getting frequent false positives on this alert.
So you're suggesting this was a false negative, i.e. that the driver did have his hands on the wheel?
I wanna know that the person is there and moving the steering wheel. Since in case of anything happening I need them to move the wheel not rest their hand somewhere.
If Tesla does not share some responsibility (in a legal sense) for this crash, then under what circumstances would they share responsibility?
Are you serious? The car decided to turn and hit a divider at 60mph without ever attempting to brake.
The reason the driver is required to pay full attention is because the software malfunctions in some cases.
If the car drove itself into a barrier without a malfunction, it's a design defect.
If the car didn't drive itself into a barrier, well, that's a different story.
Clearly, by your definition Autopilot cannot malfunction ever. Then why go on raising the point that Autopilot didn't malfunction, when you think it will always be a perfect system, even if it decided to mow down pedestrians
If you happen to have subpoena power or can otherwise legally compel the engineer to cooperate, then what will happen is that they lose their seat at the table and get downgraded to a code-monkey that gets called in as needed. "What that this widget do?", "It increments the frobbs. The thinking at the -" "That is all we need to know, thank you for your time. You are free to leave."
And not to mention, you are the engineering board and your report on this project will have a direct impact on whether they can continue to practice as an engineer.
According to a former NTSB director, there are downsides for Tesla, but none are mentioned for NTSB.
> Companies that no longer have formal status as a party to an NTSB investigation can lose access to information uncovered in the probe and the ability to shape the official record of the incident, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director at the NTSB who is now senior vice president at O’Neill & Associates, a Washington lobbying and public relations firm.
He then explicitly states that: "It will by no means stop the investigation, and it will by no means hinder the investigation."
I suspect it does make more work for the NTSB though.
> The agency stopped short of restricting Boeing’s access to its investigation ... In some previous cases, the NTSB has gone so far as to throw participants off an investigation for violating its rules. In December 2010, the safety board removed American Airlines Inc. from an investigation into a runway accident in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, two days earlier.
[0] http://www.heraldnet.com/business/ntsb-scolds-boeing-over-78...
The exception which proves the rule.
What's Tesla's batting average? 50%?
The original meaning goes like this: an exception of "if it's Thursday, you're allowed to have a brownie" proves/implies a rule of "no brownies"
This is a hot topic, and I can understand Musk not wanting to stay quiet for an entire year on each investigation. Yes, he agreed to the terms, but to not agree to the terms means you are not involved in the investigation. You don't have much choice but to agree.
Yes. Following the law is not optional.
The NTSB kicking parties off investigations is discretionary, not a legal requirement?
What law?
The horror stories about defects and lengthy repair times haven't exactly helped.
It's a bit of a moot issue for me though, as I probably won't be in the market for a new car for the next two or three years.
Just one data point here, but it absolutely has tanked Tesla's reputation in my mind. Even though I was always skeptical of them from a business perspective, I thought they were basically well-meaning and their only crime was being too enthusiastic. These last few months have convinced me that they're no better than Uber: they're being reckless with unproven and inferior technology (Elon's spin notwithstanding, there are good reasons why every other autonomous car program is using LIDAR), and they're trying to use disingenuous PR to pass off the inevitable deaths as someone else's problem.
I was vaguely considering getting a Model 3 when the waitlist eased up a little, but now that's definitely not going to happen.
Those who need their hands held about driving assistance and so-on can wait until the government OKs the first fully autonomous vehicle. Which, regardless of the name of Tesla's driver assist technology, has not yet occurred.
Adding this "we'll pull the black box data and use it to blame you for everything if anything goes wrong" approach just makes me even more wary.
I mean, I'd love an electric car with the performance of a Tesla but not if it's going to be a spy and/or can be taken hostage at a whim.
In this case Tesla has handled the entire incident rather poorly, but it makes sense that they would want to abstain from the investigation to be more transparent about what happened. Keep in mind that in a year from now the data about the accident will be mostly irrelevant.
It's pretty misleading to defend Tesla in the name of transparency: so far, Tesla has been nothing but opaque regarding this incident. There's a whole lot of spin, unsupported claims, blaming the driver, and refusing to acknowledge Autopilot problems like veering into crash barriers post-update. That's the whole reason why the NTSB "fired" them: they were trying to create confusion around a transparent investigation.
Yes, yes it does.
> lead to rampant speculation considering
> how high profile these accidents are
Self-driving car companies should have only one obligation: provide all the relevant car crash data to the investigators, then step out of the way, and keep its mouth shut until the investigation concludes.
I've been warning since a couple of years ago that this is going to be an issue if not solved early on and that self-driving car companies need to be liable for car crashes (the one who's found at fault by investigators). But we haven't even established this.
Also, I think it's inevitable that all "self-driving" that isn't guaranteed by a government body to be Level 4 or higher should be banned from public roads. Sub-Level 4 self-driving is just not safe, and the very situations in which carmakers argue it would help reduce accidents are incompatible with these companies' own ToS.
For instance, let's say someone is drunk and has a Level 2 car (like a Tesla). According to Tesla, such a person should enable self-driving, as that will on average reduce the likelihood of crashes compared to if the drunk person drove themselves home.
But Tesla's own ToS says such a person would need to be constantly vigilant and with their hands always on the wheel, not fall asleep, and so on. How likely is that going to be with a drunk person? My guess is not very likely.
If the Autopilot malfunctioned like it did in the latest crash, that drunk person would die, because there's no way a drunk person could take the wheel and drive safely when even sober people can't seem to do it when they stop paying attention for a while.
This doesn't stop drunk drivers from ending lives every day, including lives of other people who couldn't reasonably do anything to avoid it. We're just used to that. Self-driving cars promise a future of less death, though not complete elimination. It's a good future.
That is how the NTSB "party" system is ran[0]. Contrary to what is shown in various movies eg. Flight(2012), Sully (2016), an NTSB investigation is not an adversarial process, and is not a criminal investigation. Additionally, NTSB determined cause (an opinion by the board) cannot be used as evidence in civil litigation.
Asiana 214 [2] is a good example of the NTSB being somewhat divided in the opinion of the 777 autopilot having a design flaw vs "pilot human performance" as the cause of the crash.
IMHO both the autopilot design and the pilot performance were causal factors in the crash. It is probable the NTSB will determine both the Tesla driver and the autopilot were causal factors in this crash.
[0] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/process/Pages/default.as...
[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/legal/Documents/NTSB_Investigation_Part...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
There are certain situations that you can quickly get into via steering inputs to the car that cannot be recovered, so the point of even keeping your hands on the steering wheel as an argument for legal liability is moot: before you even realize what’s happening to take over and apply corrective action it will often times simply be too late.
Additionally, most people, save for professional drivers, do not have enough experience to know what corrective steering inputs to perform during an emergency situation. In many cases, any corrective action via steering, brake or acceleration control input from the human driver will be incorrect and thus lead to an unpredictable and dangerous situation.
By this logic, Tesla needs to be held accountable for any accidents where they argue human intervention would help.
When a Tesla owner chooses to use autopilot, it has a potential impact on other drivers and pedestrians around them - not just driver. Part of the reason we have regulations about seatbelts and airbags isn't just that they keep passengers safe its that they make crashes safer for others on the roads. With a human driver, others are on the same page and can do things like make eye contact or assess the behavior of another driver. In an accident, they can hold that driver responsible. It is not other drivers nor pedestrians role to accept the risk for a Tesla driver wh omay or may not understand the specific nuances of a specific software patch. Thats why we regulate vehicles and license drivers. As a society we choose to do that because the organizations that do so are an enormous efficienty and capability improvement in assessment as compared to asking each individual driver to do the same.
I don't really want to make this political but frankly the seeming lack of understanding strikes me as very software/app/tech mindset and very much a product of the intermingled libertarian leanings. Cars are not software.
Software is also not software (in this framing). I think the Facebook elections fiasco has shown that even something as innocuous as social media has consequences beyond the strictly user<->company relationship.
I've read these systems work by assigning probability to each of the sensor inputs and choosing the most likely guess at what's really happening (or something like that). But shouldn't even a low probability of "you're about to crash and die" have more weight than a high probability of "it looks like the road goes this way".
Two things:
1. Regardless of the name, Tesla has never marketed this as a product which allows you to at any point stop paying attention to the road or take your hands off the wheel. At least to my knowledge.
2. The name. "Autopilot". The only time I'd ever heard the term "autopilot" before Tesla used it was in Airplanes. I'm not entirely sure how everyone is forgetting this, but planes have had "autopilot" for decades and all passenger planes still have pilots. Commercial jets have TWO pilots (at least) who are highly paid and have a huge amount of flight time in order to ensure that someone is paying attention at all times. All of these aforementioned jets have "autopilot". Tesla is absolutely not holding their drivers to a higher standard than they should given the name "autopilot". I'm not sure why this is so often parroted but it's nonsense.
In actual fact, because Tesla's Autopilot has lane change capability, it actually goes above and beyond the conventional definition[1] of "Automatic Pilot".
Anyone with half a brain doesn't even expect a "hoverboard" in 2018 to actually hover, and that is a bastardization of the term. I'm honestly struggling to understand why people are having such a hard time with this.
It really doesn't matter what spin Tesla puts on this. Their car drove into a concrete wall. They can talk about hands on the wheel or off. They can talk about how it's only called autopilot, but it really isn't. It doesn't change the fact that their software drove the vehicle into a concrete wall. Was it asleep? Perhaps it had an attention lapse? Perhaps it mistook a solid, immovable object for something else?
If you have something called autopilot, the one thing it should never, ever do is drive into a solid, immovable object, that is easy to not hit.
It's absurd that the normal process does give companies the ability to shape the official record of the incident. They should never be a party to the NTSB investigation to begin with, because they cannot be neutral with respect to their own acts and omissions. Their role should always have been what it is now: technical assistance.
A perfect system would never have a fatality. EVERY problem that ends in fatality can ALWAYS be traced to some flaw or inadequacy. Every. Single. One.
That is why self-driving cars will eventually be far safer than any human driver (because every fatality can be stopped), and why the natural human tendency will be to crucify any company who attempts to enter the market[0,1], which will mean millions of more unnecessary deaths at the hands of human drivers because we'll delay deploying self-driving technology until it's perfect.
[0]Even if they, accurately, point out the driver is still responsible and that overall safety is improved. Accuracy doesn't matter, emotional resonance does. That's victim blaming!
[1]At the same time, this intense focus--while it's "unfair" given the masses of car deaths every day--is also what will drive the massive improvements of safety. So the inaccurate outcry can actually be a good thing. Provided that original player doesn't give up or go out of business first. This dynamic can help explain why airlines in the developed world are so ridiculously safe (...but also perhaps why airliner technology has been stagnant for half a century, with only safety and incremental efficiency/cost improvements).
I've been in a wreck on the highway from a random tire blow out. Happens all the time. While an AI will ultimately be able to handle that situation way better than a human, I don't see it eliminating all risk without just always driving slower.
I'm not saying your point isn't valid, however...
http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design:
"25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along."
Your tire blowout wasn't "random," from this perspective, it occurred due to a failure at some point: inadequately tight manufacturing tolerances, a regulator system or system integrator that accepted such tolerances, a random thing in the road (which AI could've picked up on), a temperature spike (which AI could've picked up on), a change in tire dynamics immediately preceding the incident which you didn't notice (which AI could've picked up on), incomplete inspections, etc.
Even if that specific failure is NOT directly something that AI would solve, the elimination of basically every human driving error would bring focus to any other problems. Right now, random tire blowouts are not the predominant cause of death and so people don't focus much on it, but if all other causes were eliminated, then all of a sudden everyone would be focusing on better engineered tires.
This is the same dynamic as in airline safety. Every airliner failure in developed countries is plastered over the media for months simply because it's so rare, therefore any remaining deficiency is brought into tight focus.
I can see the headline: "Tesla owner DIES in random tire blowout! Shoddy quality to control to blame; sharks circle as Tesla tanks!"
(High media coverage is a double-edged sword for Tesla...)
> I don't see it eliminating all risk without just always driving slower.
...it's worth noting that airliners use tires at hundreds of miles per hour, yet fatalities basically never happen. Things can be engineered to be arbitrarily safe.
>...it's worth noting that airliners use tires at hundreds of miles per hour, yet fatalities basically never happen. Things can be engineered to be arbitrarily safe.
Aircraft are protecting all eggs in one basket. If you want to talk about the roadways being maintained and cleaned at the level of runways, you're crediting self-driving for something that isn't self-driving. Aircraft may have different structural scaling laws in play too (500 20 second touchdowns before replacement/refurbishment, short periods high stress).
An how far are you going to allow reengineering everything? Would it be ok to call slightly modified 747s that can taxi themselves self-driving cars? Trains?
The passengers on Air France 4590 would beg to differ, if they could. The Concorde ran over debris, and the resulting in tire damage that punctured a fuel tank, leading to a fire and subsequent loss of life.
There a plenty of aircraft incidents that are caused by tire failures. Expecting technology to prevent every eventuality is folly.
Elon Musk should intervene and apologize if he has even a bit of humanity.
The NTSB's job is to investigate accidents, and as part of that to maintain their own reputation. Their job is not to pressure companies into not saying anything. By attempting to do so they are just hampering the ability to investigate the accident.
If Tesla had said "and the NTSB investigation is going in this direction" I would have agreed with the decision. But as boneheaded as Tesla's PR has been it hasn't done anything of the sort, the NTSB has no reason to fear for their own reputation as a result of this.
1. Having Tesla keep their mouths shut results in more unbiased people. Kicking Tesla off the investigation is in large part a deterrent, not a corrective action.
2. This change also involves giving Tesla less access to data that they might leak. Information collected from the car's logs is under NTSB control (in past cases, for example, American Airlines was punished for making its own copy of the black box before handing it over). You can reduce these issues by not sharing information with an unreliable party.
This purpose is in plain violation of the principles of freedom of speech, and the first amendment. The government is not permitted, morally or legally, to punish people for speaking. As such I'm not counting it.
> 2. This change also involves giving Tesla less access to data that they might leak. Information collected from the car's logs is under NTSB control (in past cases, for example, American Airlines was punished for making its own copy of the black box before handing it over). You can reduce these issues by not sharing information with an unreliable party.
This could be a legitimate purpose, but it seems so minor that short of the NTSB mentioning it I'm skeptical. The gain doesn't seem to be worth the loss of working closely with the manufacturer...
Generally exceptions to free speech are extremely limited, "because we don't want you to bias people" is definitely not within an exception.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-white-first-amend...
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2017/06/08/free-speech-tropes-in-the...